Lorin Maazel twirls the baton once more in New York

Chris LeeLorin Maazel will conduct his final concerts as the New York Philharmonic's music director this week at Lincoln Center.

Lorin Maazel became music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2002, six decades after he first conducted the orchestra as a famously sharp-eared teenage phenom. The musical excellence of the past seven years hasn't been surprising. After all, Maazel is one of the last podium maestros in the illustrious style, and the Philharmonic is as virtuosic an ensemble as you'll find. But Maazel's relationship with the orchestra has been exceedingly warm.

"There hasn't been a single cloud between us, and that isn't always the case between orchestras and their music directors," says the 79-year-old Maazel, who has directed ensembles from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Munich to Vienna and will conduct his final concerts as the New York Philharmonic's music director this week at Lincoln Center. "I'm very proud of the affection in which the musicians hold me. We have a congenial rapport that feels special."

The ease with which they communicate has something to do with the fact that Maazel and his musicians all speak English. But it goes far deeper than simply conversing.

"Our rapport comes down to shared values, being no-nonsense in rehearsal and ready to go for it in performance" he says. "The musicians don't want to hear speeches; they come prepared and want to get to making music. I feel exactly the same way, and I have unbounded admiration for their focus and intelligence."

Maazel has left his mark on the New York Philharmonic by appointing one-fifth of the orchestra's current lineup, striving to balance sterling musicianship with individuality, in the New York tradition. They have performed cycles of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky together, as well as premiered such works as John Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning 9/11 memorial, "On the Transmigration of Souls" (their recording earned a Grammy).

Although the conductor insists he has mellowed with age and is "way past ego trips," Maazel's Lincoln Center finale will be a grand event, performed for packed houses. He and the orchestra will cap their Mahler cycle with the Symphony No. 8 -- nicknamed "Symphony of a Thousand" for the forces the 90-minute work entails, including a huge choir and eight vocal soloists. The composer, who directed the New York Philharmonic just before he died in 1911, said of the Eighth's conclusion: "Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound."

This will be Maazel's fifth career Mahler cycle (including one recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic in the '80s). Yet the conductor says he was never "a fanatic" about Mahler, particularly when it came to the Eighth's almost impossibly epic blend of Christian hymn and Goethe's "Faust." Maazel struggled with this symphony for years, he says, but "I finally got it -- a victory of Mahler's genius over my reticence."

Although the Eighth is an optimistic work of spiritual philosophy, Mahler feared the human race might eventually do itself in. "No matter how triumphant some of Mahler's finales can seem, they are more hopeful than certain," Maazel says. "That sense of wistful hopefulness at the Eighth's end is something that resonates with me."

Maazel plans to keep his baton active in the coming years. He plans to work with the Vienna Philharmonic and London's Philharmonia, as well as to return to New York. He is less enamored of the sobriquet "maestro" these days than with that of "music-maker," pointing out that "what we work with is just dots and slashes on a page until we bring alive the music behind the notes. It's like tuning in a radio, and I feel privileged every time the music comes through."